Hackers?

Like always, there is a chance of hackers. However there is no sure fire way to prevent this, there are certainly precautions that will be taken to ensure a protected game. You can expect there will not be anything revolving around address editing such as money hacks through cheat engine as values like money an stats will be saved on the server side versus the client side.

The issue would stem more from the exploits and glitches within the game such as maybe going straight from a bank to a trade screen thus duplicating items. I believe Llama's intense packet logging will indeed net and and duplicate such bugs. However, with community help and cooperation, we can resolve many of these issues before they reach the hands of corrupt individuals.


#EDIT: sorry for the poor typing. Class was coming to an end and I felt as if I needed to touch on this topic. I have revised my original statement and posted more in-depth input.

One thing that we have in our favour, is that llama's work is at least partly based around secure programming, so he will have more experience in this area than the average developer. From what I understand, he also was responsible for ferreting out a lot of potential exploits in FO.

Yessir I was. Typically when we got a report of an exploit I would test it and figure out how to reproduce it reliably.

And as mvp said, it is impossible to 100% prevent hackers. You have to do everything server side, EVERYTHING. The clients become little more than dumb terminals for input that gets sent to the server for processing and display whatever the server says. This is known as an "authoritative server". Where you have problems is by trusting anything sent from the client to be true (meaning everything has to be verified before trusted) and the only way to prevent it is verbose logging. You log 100x more than you think you need. Then if/when someone finds a way to use lag to duplicate an item, you can look into whatever they were doing for the previous 10 minutes and see what happened that caused the problem.